


In the dark of the moon, I planted, but there came an early snow

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Masturbation, Menstruation, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Puberty, Sexual Content, mutant mix of show and book elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:07:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24941323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: After getting Needle back, Arya runs from the Hound.After escaping Dragonstone, Gendry does not return to King's Landing.Here's where they end up.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 39
Kudos: 309





	1. Chapter 1

It hadn’t been hard, really. 

The Hound had been far too distracted by filling his gut with his coveted chicken that he hadn’t realized she’d slipped away. With Needle clutched tightly in one hand and blood still rushing under her skin from killing Polliver, it had been easy. The stout gray mare tied up outside had shown no distress at her untying and mounting her. She moved surprisingly fast for an old nag. 

The day after she leaves, it begins to rain. She doesn’t feel the cold or the wet. She’s just pleased it’s covering her trail. 

That day the hunger begins to get at her. All she manages to find is a handful of berries, and she barely checks to see if they appear to look edible before shoveling them down. Might that be better, if they gave her stomach cramps and shakes and she died out here, alone. 

She has no idea where she’s going. Is she still in the Riverlands? She thinks about finding a village, it’s dangerous out here for a lone girl.

She finds one one day, and stares from out in the trees. The people look blessedly ordinary. They push their carts and smile and laugh. Their buildings are still in shambles. The war has not stopped here. Arya sees several crying.

Arya turns her back to them and leaves. 

She wonders if the Hound is still following her.

The rain continues, and the air becomes colder.

The hunger pit in her stomach gets stronger the further she rides. It grows and grows and threatens to swallow her alive. To burst forth from her gut, a demon all it’s own.

She steals a loaf of bread off a windowsill. The beast abates, enough for the girl to feel guilt. 

She’s getting closer to the sea, she thinks at least. The smell of salt is on the air, the way it was on the Kingsroad when they passed through the Riverlands. She guesses that she’s heading southeast, she’d tried so hard to turn away from the Eyrie, and away from wherever it was the Hound wanted to take her. Her Aunt Lysa. She might be her only remaining family, but Arya has never met her. 

At night, as she recites her list, her mind cycles through their faces. 

Her father, she is glad Yoren stopped her from seeing him. Her mother, throat slit from ear to ear like that Frey man had laughed about. Robb and Grey Wind, defiled even in death.There are rumours out of Winterfell, about Bran and Rickon that she can’t even contemplate. 

Who knew what had even become of Jon, at the wall?

Sansa, wed to a Lannister, rumor had it. Though Arya mused, the Imp was far superior to Joffrey. Lost to her either way. 

She doesn’t let herself think of Gendry, of his face as they dragged him off tied like a hog, sold for coin like one too. 

Afterwards, she goes through her list of names again, before passing out with Needle on her lap. 

She keeps her ears perked up, and at the tiniest hint of voices in the distance, she and the old nag will flee. 

One night, she hears men laughing. Even without hearing their words she feels the rage ball up in her chest and has to press her head into the ground to try and block it out. They’re probably only laughing at a fart.

Though most days she prefers the rage to the numbness.

She tries to exhaust herself, so that the dreams won’t plague her. Even the wolf dreams, where she runs through the underbrush, the scent of blood on her nose, don’t please her the way they used to. If she ran into Nymeria, would she even let her see her? Or had she gone wild again?

The smell of salt leaves the air, and Arya’s less sure of where she’s going. Eventually, she finds another village, but to call it a village seems wrong. It’s a corpse. Buildings are crumbled, destroyed, burned. The fields too. The people too, walk around as though dead themselves. 

Arya remembers vaguely hearing about the rampage committed by Lannister men led by the Mountain. That had been near Pinkmaiden. Clearly she was further west than she had first thought.

It was easy enough to tie Nan (she’d decided sometime before Nan was a good enough name for a horse) to a tree and begin helping the men and boys who were clearing debris. They don’t ask questions. 

She’s not sure how long she’s been here, fetching and carrying, sleeping in the woods, eating the gruel they all share when they have it, not talking to people. Maybe a sennight or two. It rains the whole time. 

It helps. She still feels cold and angry inside, but now she’s too tired to dwell on it, and in the freezing rain she supposes no one else can tell. 

Sometime past the third sennight, one of the women who brings them food twice a day shoves a bowl of gruel into her hands and tells her to take it to the smithy. 

“We need more nails, and he don’t come outside for nothing it seems.”

The forge could barely be called a building anymore, half of it’s roof has been caved in and smoke billows from it. But it is still being worked. 

She didn’t give it any sort of thought. There were thousands of blacksmiths across all of Westeros, every keep and every town and every village had one. 

She had absolutely no reason to think that when she came in and called out, “the men need more nails”, the smith would turn to her voice and she would meet a pair of blue eyes she was certain belonged to a dead man. 

She drops the bowl. 

Sometime later, over the remains of the gruel, she asks. 

“What did the Red Woman want with you?”

Gendry wipes his mouth and says, as slowly as possible. 

“My blood. She would have killed me, but one of Stannis’s men put me in a boat and set me free.”

Arya is skeptical. 

“You got here from a boat?”

Gendry shrugs. 

“I can’t row, or swim. I tried to follow Ser Davos’s directions….but I got lost. Got out as soon as I saw dry land. Meant to head back to King’s Landing, got lost again. People here needed help, seemed a good enough place. Better than King’s Landing. No kings and queens.”

No kings and queens to help them rebuild from the rampage of the king’s man, Arya thought.

They’ve finished up, and Arya plans to leave to sleep beside Nan again, when Gendry asks. 

“What about you?”

Arya had been hoping he wouldn’t ask. 

“I ran from the Brotherhood, got grabbed by the Hound. Immediately. Made it to the Twins, then we left. He let his guard down and I ran again.”

Gendry’s face goes cold. It’s not been warm before, not even like it had been when she’d seen him last. 

“There-there have been stories making their way here about the Twins…”

Arya’s voice is even, dead. 

“They’re true. I was there. I was outside. They killed my mother, my brother, his wife, their child, most of their men. Many men I’ve known since I was a child. They slit my mother’s throat and threw her body in the river. They killed my brother’s wolf too, cut off his head and sewed it to Robb’s body…”

Her words are pointed. Saying them makes the ice in her gut begin to burn again. It’s something more than the nothing that it’s been. 

Gendry, to his credit, lets her talk.

When night falls, Arya looks him up and down. 

“Where have you been sleeping?”

He points to a blanket in the corner, in the part of the forge that still has a roof. 

He has a blanket, she has a horse. They’ll get soaked either way, so when she tilts her head out the door, he follows her without comment. 

Her stomach swoops slightly, when she realizes that in the handful of moons since she’d seen him, she’s already gotten a bit taller. 

The first night, overcome by the memories of the nights on the road to Harrenhal, she rolls onto her side and lays a hand across his shoulder. 

His muscles tense up underneath her fingers. 

“Please don’t touch me.”

His voice is rough, rougher than she’s heard him before. She obeys, rolling to lay in the opposite direction, heart a little more of a hole than before. 

In the morning, she shows him Needle. 

“The Hound and I found Polliver. A fight ensued, I got this back and stabbed him through the throat.”

“Just like Lommy,” Gendry says, with understanding. He doesn’t flinch. Maybe someday she’ll even tell him about the stable boy. 

It’s while they’re still in Pinkmaiden that they hear what happened to Joffrey. 

As soon as they’re away from the others, Arya doubles over in laughter. It’s hollow laughter. 

“I wanted to be the one to do it,” she admits, “I thought I’d slit his throat with Needle, or poison him, or choke him on a chicken bone if I had to.”

She giggles more at the thought of Joffrey’s beautiful golden face purple with lack of air.

“At least that’s one name off your list.”

She still recites the list every night, without fail. She leaves on the Red Woman and the others, and she feels Gendry shift at her back every time. His breathing is rough, even in sleep, and some nights he tosses and turns. Bad dreams, Arya imagines, much like her. 

After maybe two or three moons, Arya’s feet feel the need to shift underneath her. 

“I don’t think we should stay here,” she tells Gendry, “As things get better here, people will start to talk, to ask questions. Especially if they see me with Needle.”

A girl wearing trousers was unusual enough, a girl with trousers and a sword would definitely be remembered. And though she knows she’s no beauty, she has felt her arms and legs lengthening and suspects her years of disguising herself as a boy are coming to an end.

The first days in Pinkmaiden, Arya had tucked Needle carefully away under a rock near where Nan was tied. Once she’d found Gendry, she’d taken to leaving it in the forge. 

Gendry’s face is grave. 

“Where can we go?”

Arya sighs, tucking her knees up to her chest.

“I don’t know. Winterfell has been taken, Riverrun’s under control of the Freys. The Hound is probably still in the Vale trying to find me. I’m not going back to King’s Landing. I don’t know enough about the Stormlands or the Reach to risk it…”

Gendry’s quiet for a long time. 

“We could just pick a direction and go. If something happens, we’ll pick up and move again. We’re getting good at it.”

She looks at him, a touch of longing in her eyes. He doesn’t want to leave her again. And she supposes that that’s something. 

They set off in the night, with little more than the clothes on their backs and some of Gendry’s tools. They still have Nan though, and that’s something too. 

Despite their plan, Arya deliberately does not guide them west. The Westerlands are Lannister lands and if they end up there Arya does not think she will be able to keep a lid on her rage. These days, she mostly settles for level instead of dead. She would have thought rage would keep her warm, but most nights it just threatens to help her freeze.

It’s in a tavern, somewhere in the Riverlands that they hear of King Tommen’s coronation. 

Arya shoves her last bite of her pie down. Gendry had a tiny bit of coin left from what Davos had given him, but they didn’t want to waste it. That day, they had found the tiny tavern, off the beaten path, and they were just too hungry to resist. They forage some, hunt and trap with their miniscule knowledge, but it barely keeps them fed. 

“Looks like a babe he does,” the man swears, “Not even a hint of a beard.”

“Babe or not, he still the spawn of incest-”

The innkeep comes over and cuts him off with the slap of a wooden spoon to the head. 

“There will be no talk of that here. I won’t be bringing the king’s men down on this place.”

And Arya and Gendry slink off to their spot in the woods. 

“I remember Tommen,” she admits, “He was really shy, always off playing with his kittens. Joffrey was horrid to him as well.”

“Do you think he’ll make a better king than his brother?”

Arya shakes her head slowly. 

“They’re right, he’s basically a babe. He’ll be under one thumb of his mother and one of his Hand, Tywin.”

Gendry can’t keep the distaste at the name of Tywin Lannister off of his face. Arya thinks grimly, that he had somehow seemed to like her. 

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll kill each other.”

And Arya laughs, again.

After a day or two of hitting water, with a sinking feeling Arya realizes they’ve hit the God’s Eye. It’s a decent spot, good fishing as long as winter hasn’t set in. But up, directly north of the God’s Eye lies Harrenhal. 

Sometimes at night, Arya wakes up early in the dark, and thinks she’s still there. 

Sometimes she stares off into the lake, where the isle of faces lies. Maybe they could swim out there, live among the weirwoods, like the children of the forest did. 

It’s by the shores by the God’s Eye that Gendry wakes one morning to Arya rustling through their belongings, her breeches unlaced and halfway down her legs.

“Arya, what are you-”

“Do you have any bandages, extra stockings, an old shirt maybe?”

Her voice is almost panicked. He almost joins her when he notices the dark red stains on her smallclothes, before his mind catches up with the situation. 

She eventually finds an empty burlap sack that she slices with Needle and folds thick. It would do until they could reach a village and she could trade for some lambswool. 

She spends most of the morning in the lake, nude from the waist down, trying to scrub her small clothes clean. She can’t fight the feeling that the blood might attract predators, even though part of her brain insists that that’s stupid. 

When she returns to camp, Gendry can’t look at her. 

“Don’t be stupid,” she chides him, sitting and eating from their pitiful stash of nuts and berries. She’s the same as yesterday, just now bleeding from the cunt.

Later that day, she admits. 

“Know what I keep thinking of? If I hadn’t ran when I did, I might have been with the Hound when this happened.”

She wonders if the Hound knew anything about how women’s bodies worked. Would he have let her ride her own horse now?

She laughs roughly, though Gendry remains silent. 

Later that night, with her stomach aching, she wishes Gendry would rest a hand on her middle, just for the hint of warmth. Arya remembers the stories her septa told her, of lost maidenheads and childbirth. It wasn’t fair. Did every part of womanhood involve pain?

And quietly, a few moons later, she confides to Gendry. 

“I’ve flowered. If I had gone back to my family, they could marry me off now. Might have already betrothed me to someone, for all I know.”

But they’re dead now, she doesn’t say. They’re dead, and she can’t know. Can’t be angry at them, even if they had done it, because they’re dead and she’s grieving. She continues though,

“That’s all a highborn girl is. A tool for her family to use for their benefit, no input from her required.”

She’s needling him, because after all of this, sometimes he still slips up and calls her “milady.” The last time had been in a tavern, in front of people. People who might hear him. 

Sometimes she catches him looking at her now. Looking at her in a way. It doesn’t bother her, the way she often thought it might. In fact, secretly she might admit she likes it. But she hates what comes after, the look of self-loathing that always seems to follow. She hates that he still thinks of himself as less than her. 

And he still won’t touch her. 

One early morning, Arya twitches awake to the sounds of leaves rustling. She smells the man’s breath, heavy with ale, before she feels the hand even reaches to cover her mouth.

Her heart hammers itself to life. She still sleeps with Needle under her. 

The man is alone, and drunk. It is easy enough to slice up the arm that’s grabbing her, splitting the artery that bleeds heavily. He screams and falls half on top of her, his weight trapping her, pressing her into the ground. 

She hadn’t even realized Gendry had woken, but the man clearly hadn’t either. Had he just seen a young girl asleep in the grass, ignoring the lad and horse along with her? Arya’s mouth tastes of bile as Gendry pulls the man off her, and she crawls to her feet and slashes his throat. He howls as he dies.

Gendry is breathing as heavily as the bull he was often accused of being, and looking at Arya like she was a creature from one of Old Nan’s stories. 

The dead man has a dagger in his belt, and Arya feels a fresh rush of bile at the thought that he could have used it. He could have gutted her before she could even grasp for Needle.

“Take it,” she tells Gendry, “You’re not armed. What if you had been on your own?”

She thinks on the man’s throat gaping open, and retches, remembering what had become of her mother. She imagines Walder Frey meeting his end in the same way, skin sagging open as the life drained from him. 

The rains start again. They’ve managed to avoid Harrenhal, but Arya still often notices patches of land that ring familiar to her mind. The rain stops this, leaves them wandering. 

There’s no water to fish in, they can’t forage as easily in the rain. The hunger begins to get to them, and so it’s unspoken between them. They must find an inn, somewhere to both fill their bellies and rest their bones. They’re down to the very last of Gendry’s coin, miraculously having not lost it to robbers. 

It’s raining too heavily, so they don’t recognize it. They tie Nan up as best as they can, and push through the front door against the wailing wind. 

The inside isn’t large, but it is blessedly dry, and a girl about Arya’s age approaches them, her feet skidding. 

“Are you lookin’ for a room or just a meal?”

Arya barely opens her mouth when a head sticks out from where the kitchen is and yells. 

“Willow! The soup’s done!”

Arya freezes. She feels Gendry go tense beside her. Not a sound will escape. 

Except from the cook. 

“Arry? Gendry?” Hot Pie says, abandoning his soup to come out and embrace the both of them. He’s somehow gotten both taller and rounder since the last time they’ve seen him, and Arya watches as Gendry’s face pinches and winces at the touch.

Sickness slides into Arya’s gut like an oil slick when she recognizes where they are. 

“Sit, come on,” Hot Pie insists, “It’s been what, nearly two years? WIllow, bring us some bread and ale.”

“No,” Arya says firmly, and Gendry agrees. 

“We won’t be staying.”

“What, why not?” Hot Pie asks, confused. 

“Because this was the inn where those Brotherhood fucks brought us, and if they find us again, we’re fucked,” Gendry explains. 

There’s a harsh laugh from behind them, coming from a woman who looks like Willow, but older. 

“As if those fucks would come back here, now that winter’s coming. Bridge out over the hill stopping most of our business. Used to come by all the time they did, buying our ale and brings us more orphans to protect, but where are they now that they need food?”

“That’s Jeyne,” Hot Pie explains. “Masha Heddle died a bit back. She runs this place now. And she’s right, the men of the Brotherhood don’t come here anymore.”

“They probably stay near Acorn Hall now that the bridge is out,” Willow interjects, “There’s always whores over that side.”

Hot Pie’s voice quiets a bit before his next comment.

“There’s stories come from a couple of the younger boys about the lot of them now...but we don’t know for sure. It’s been moons since we seen any of them.”

The food they are served is more than adequate at least. Throughout supper, a group of young children make their way into the walls, soaking wet. Most of them are thin, but obviously not starved. One of the older girls, maybe Arya’s age, but looking far more Sansa, hands a bag of flour to Hot Pie. 

“Miller says use it slow. With winter on the way, the wheel won’t turn if the river freezes.”

A couple of the children approach Arya and Gendry throughout the meal, most out of curiosity, some of suspicion. They answer questions in vagaries. Some of the younger children try to touch Gendry affectionately, as Arya once had. He still scoots away. 

One of the older girls tries to touch him a little less innocently. She’s the one that sort of looks like Sansa, like she’s used to boys acting a certain way around her. Gendry jerks so violently at her touch and her coquettish voice that he falls off the end of the bench, and quickly excuses himself. 

“Are you and him, like,” The girl, her name is Elinor, later asks Arya when they’re alone, “Or is he one of those men who just doesn’t like girls?”

Arya sighs. Once she would have felt a glimmer of pride to be considered on the same level as the Gendry, that ordinary people might think they went together. 

“No. Someone’s hurt him.”

The room they are given is the size of a pantry, but the roof doesn’t leak, and if the door only sticks instead of closing, that’s fine enough too. 

Tossing the bag of their meager possessions at the foot of the narrow bed, Arya mentions. 

“One of the older girls asked me if I was yours.”

Gendry’s expression is gruff. 

“Should have said you were my sister again.”

Arya sighs and sits beside him. 

“That isn’t going to work anymore, we’re too old and we don’t look anything alike. I don’t think it will be an issue here. This place is full of orphans, we’re just two more.”

Arya swallows the sob that surges up in her throat at her own words. She’s an orphan now. 

Gendry nods. 

“Hot Pie says we can probably stay as long as we’re willing to work. If we hear anything from the Brotherhood, we’ll leave, no questions asked.”

They’re both silent. Neither of them are ready to sleep yet, it’s too early and they’re too warm and too full. And there’s too much between them. 

“What did the Red Woman do to you?” Arya finally asks. 

Gendry turns away. 

“I already told you, she wanted my blood-”

Arya cuts him off. 

“No. I asked what she wanted you for before. I want to know what she did to you to get it.”

Gendry stares at the floor, but eventually begins to talk.

“On the way to Dragonstone, she asked me if I knew who my father was. She insists it was the former king.”

Arya pauses before commenting. 

“You do look like him, in a way Joffrey and Tommen certainly don’t.”

That’s not to say she sees a bit of fat, drunken, lecherous Robert Baratheon in his though.

Gendry nods.

“When we got there, she sent me to my rooms, and then came up alone. Started telling me all kinds of big words, things about king’s blood, and how important I could be. And then she started taking off her clothes, and mine too...at that point, I would have done anything she said, I couldn’t think. I barely remember any of it, until the point I realized I was chained down and couldn’t move, and then Stannis was there, and she was dropping leeches on my cock, and there was fire and chanting...I cried and screamed, and no one cared. Then they left me alone in a cell for days. Davos let me out when he realized they intended to sacrifice me to their Red God.”

Arya watches his face. There’s shame there, shame and fear and violation. In his face, she sees ghosts. Ghosts of the girls Lannister soldiers would drag into bushes along the road. She feels the ghost of the man by the road, and his ale soaked breath. 

“I’ll kill her,” she says, even and low. “She promised we would meet again. When we do I’ll split her down the middle and let her entrails spill out on the road.”

Gendry’s avoiding her eye. 

“If all she needed was your blood, there’s a thousand ways she could have done that. She didn’t need to…”

Gendry’s eyes are squeezed shut now. 

“I fall asleep and she pops up in my dreams. When people touch me, I remember her touching me. Fuck, whenever I see a pretty girl, I remember her and suddenly I’m disgusted at myself and want to retch.”

Arya shifts, moving so that she’s kneeling on the end of the bed between Gendry’s knees. She looks him in the eye. 

“I’m going to hug you. But first, open your eyes.”

He obeys. 

“This is just me. We’re not in Dragonstone, we’re in the Riverlands, at the Inn. Both of us have our clothes on. I’m not the red woman. I’m not that tall, I don’t have red hair, I don’t use big words when little ones will do. And lets be real, my tits are tiny.”

Gendry’s laugh is rough.

“I’m going to hug you, and that’s it. I think we both need it. If you tell me to stop, I will.”

Gendry waits, his eyes trailing shut. But then, there’s a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. 

Her arms fit more easily around him, than they ever did before, and she rests her chin on his shoulder. After a long moment, she feels his arms come up around her too. Before Hot Pie today, she can’t remember the last time anyone hugged her. 

“You were right,” he admits, “We did both need this.”

He doesn’t let go. 

“Don’t talk about killing her anymore though. I don’t like knowing you had so many demons that needed killin’ even before you took mine upon you..”

Arya sighs, breathing in the scent of his neck. 

“Alright, I won’t talk about it. I will do it though, I have to. She tried to take you away from me and nearly succeeded. They’ve already taken my family, they won’t get the rest of my pack.”

Eventually they part. They sleep back to back that night, still not touching, but Arya hears Gendry’s breathing much more evenly than on the road. She waits to recite her list until she’s sure he’s asleep.

And outside the window, she swears she hears a wolf howl.


	2. Chapter 2

They stay at the inn for not quite two years.

Willow has managed to find her a couple of simple dresses, in nondescript brown, that she can wear over her shirts when she’s helping them inside. 

And inside there is always so much to do. 

Gendry has taken up clearing out the little forge, and often goes out to fix hinges or pot handles or whatnot that need fixing, when they need fixing. When there’s nothing that needs it, he comes inside. He misses it, but tells Arya it’s no matter, there’s hardly any spare iron so it’s not like he can experiment or make things for fun. Some of the children, the older boys especially, watch him curiously, but most abandon the post when he is discovered to be taciturn and gruff. 

Inside, everything constantly needs scrubbing, from the floors to the pots. Linens need washing, floors sweeping. And while she hated the word “lady” Arya was hardly allergic to work, especially work that let her forget a little. 

On the third night they are there, Willow drags the copper tub into the kitchen after supper and insists Arya have a bath.

“No offense Arya, but guests won’t want to stay here if you smell as bad as you do now.”

Arya pouts as she sheds her clothes. 

“Why only me, why aren’t you getting on Gendry about it?”

“Gendry took his yesterday, he asked for it.”

Arya still grumbles a bit as she strips and climbs into the water, but she admits that Gendry had come to bed the night before smelling better than he often did.

Willow offers her a rag and piece of hard soap and she and Jeyne continue cleaning up for the end of the night. Thankfully, Hot Pie had left to eat his own supper in the main room. 

Arya scrubs at every inch of her skin until it is red and tender. She feels as though she could peel her very skin off and emerge a whole new girl. 

Wearing a dress and scrubbing floors, she feels like she could transform bodily into this new girl, a girl who wasn’t dead inside. Who maybe didn’t have parents but had long grown used to this fact. Who didn’t dream of heads cut off and throats slit at night and about taking her sword to those responsible during the day, spilling their heart’s blood onto the snow. 

When the water has gone dark and murky, Arya stands to dry off and redress. She’s distracted, but the sudden realization of what has become of her own body. 

She was pale and gaunt, but she knew this. She had some scars, though she had not examined them. The roundness of her breasts was new, they previously having been little more than flat pink circles on a chest resembling a wall.

She’s poking at them curiously, when she hears Jeyne snort behind her. 

“Never seen them before?”

Arya frowns. 

“They weren’t here last time I had a chance to look.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll grow tired of them soon enough.”

Jeyne’s not there later that night, when she’s on the bed in just her shift. Gendry’s outside still, making sure the fire in the forge is out and the entrance isn’t being littered with abandoned tools and toys. She takes the few minutes she has to herself, pulls the shift off, and takes a closer look. 

The cool air makes her nipples hard, and this shocks her enough she quickly pulls the shift back down to her waist. There’s a slope to her hips now, though the bones still stick through her skin. The thatch of dark hair between her legs doesn’t shock her, though admittedly, it is rather more wrinkly and coarse than expected. 

Investigating further, curious about the bits where her moon’s blood comes from, evokes very strange feelings in her. Each tentative touch makes her feel warm and her heart race. Flushed, she finds she enjoys it, and keeps up the clumsy touches until she hears Gendry’s voice downstairs. 

His voice seems to make the feelings increase, and Arya has to fight the urge to keep going, to find out where this all goes, but she forces herself to pull her shift back down and crawl into bed. 

This new Arya would have to discover herself more later. 

A few minutes later, Gendry enters and joins her in bed silently. When his breathing evens, Arya rolls on her side to watch him for a moment, feeling strangely guilty. 

They’ve been at the inn a sennight when Hot Pie tells Arya about Brienne and Podrick. 

“Big woman she was,” he tells Arya, “Blonde, serious, carried a big sword. Seemed like the sort of woman you might know. She was looking for your sister so I told her I’d seen you.”

Arya wants to yell at him, but yelling at Hot Pie is like yelling at a baby, ineffective and makes you feel like a monster. Arya can’t believe she was once frightened of him.

“When was this?”

“Bout half a year back. I think she was headed to the Vale.”

Arya nods. That makes sense. Maybe she had run into the Hound by now. She hopes he had no idea what direction she had gone.

She wonders where the mystery woman would even take her. Part of her thinks she would have liked to meet a tall, strong woman who carried a sword and traveled with a squire. The other part of her knows she couldn’t have trusted her. 

Many days, most of the children stay inside, helping with chores when they can, bickering and running about when they can’t. 

The rain keeps up, falling harder and harder, sometimes becoming sleet or hail. 

On the rare clear days, the inn empties out. The older girls make runs for supplies, the boys to look for work. 

Some of the boys go into the woods near the inn to try to hunt or trap, but they rarely bring anything back. Arya tries to show them how to tie their snares better, but most of them laugh her off. She stuffs down the urge to fight them. It would do nothing but make her and Gendry unwelcome.

At supper time, when most of the inn’s meager guests wander in, seeking either food or a bed, Arya and Gendry eat in the kitchen with Hot Pie, trying to stay out of sight, and listen to the gossip. 

Nothing that comes out of King’s Landing is that interesting. King Tommen’s marriage, the rise of the Faith Militant, none of it interests Arya at all. 

The rumours from Winterfell interest her more. Interest here, meaning enrage. Some say Roose Bolton’s bastard claimed Winterfell by marrying Sansa Stark, others Arya Stark. Arya’s not sure which one makes her angrier. 

The first night she had heard it, she told Gendry she would be out late. 

She borrows Jeyne’s axe and takes it a dozen times to a stump out behind the inn. The rain has not slowed that night, and when she returns, Gendry tells her she looks like a drowned rat. 

“I don’t know which would be worse,” she admits as she changes and crawls into bed, “If Sansa was really married to him- I can’t imagine it was willingly, not to the son of the man who betrayed our mother and brother- or if some poor girl is being passed off as me and that’s what people are going to believe has become of me.”

He reaches out and gently touches her shoulder. It’s the most physical contact he’s initiated since before, and it makes her shudder. 

That night she dreams she’s Nymeria again. If Sansa is indeed in the clutches of the bastard of Bolton, then Arya wishes her all of her wolf dreams, and all of her wolf’s blood. 

Arya finds many days she enjoys watching the children play. It’s no surprise to her that lowborn orphans play just like highborn nobles, she should know, she’s played with both. 

One cloudy day, she spies Eben and Deren playing at swords with sticks, as she often had. Her heart twinges, thinking briefly of Mycah.

“You’re gripping it too tight,” she calls out to Deren, who’s holding onto his stick as though for dear life, limiting his movement, “No one’s going to yank it from your hand.”

Not in a proper fight, she thinks, though in a brawl it has possibilities. Cutting the sword hand too is a good thought. 

“What would you know about it?”

Arya’s muscles stiffen. She doesn’t wear Needle at her hip here, it’s tucked safely upstairs. She wears a dress most days. Most of the orphans don’t think her anything but an ordinary girl. She’ll show them. 

It takes her two swift movements to knock Deren off balance and wrench the stick from his hand. He’s stumbled back, blinking in shock. Three more fluid movements, and she’s knocked the other stick from Eben’s hand.

He scrambles to pick it back up, and three seconds later, Arya’s disarmed him again.

By the time either Eben or Deren can keep their sticks in their hands around her, more children have gathered to watch. 

“Did you remind them to stand sideface?” Gendry asks later, amused.

“Can’t stand sideface if you can’t even keep your sword in your hand.”

It’s after about six moon’s that they overhear one of the older boy’s saying that Lord Beric is dead. 

He doesn’t speak of it as though it was a battle though.

“Thoros could only raise one, and Beric told him to let him go, gave away his life willingly.”

Arya ignores the rest of his words. She mutters to Gendry. 

“One more off my list. Good.”

Her list is still repeated, often under her breath, a prayer to chase away the nightmares.

The nights are becoming colder, so Arya takes the axe and chops more stumps. She comes to bed with her shoulders burning, and Gendry already asleep. 

She wonders who it was that Beric wanted Thoros to raise instead of him. 

Jeyne gives her a look the next morning and tells her that if she’s got that much extra anger to get rid of, she can chop wood properly, in the mornings with the rest of the boys. 

The weather turns a bit, and occasionally, the rain turns to snow. The snow is barely even close to what Winterfell got in the summer, and when most of the other orphans shiver and shake, Arya steps out onto the powder and spins around, amazed at how the snow has decorated the landscape. She teaches the younger children that day how to make snow people.

Sometimes the children even come to her with their wooden sticks, asking her to show them how to play fight. She’s nearly sick a few times thinking of any of them having to use a real blade. 

Unfortunately, with the weather turning comes the scarcity of winter, even if winter is still only coming. The day comes quickly that Elinor comes back from the next village empty handed, as the mill wheel has quit turning in the river. 

And with the coming cold, Arya comes to long for the walls of Winterfell. Even in the depths of the coldest winter, the hot springs would force hot water through the walls, warming the stone. It’s inhabitants might fear a famine or a siege, but never freezing. 

The first night that the chill takes its place in the air, Gendry rolls on one side and throws an arm over her and presses his nose into her hair. Arya freezes, eventually realizing from the soft murmurs he makes that he’s not quite awake. 

Her heart thunders in her chest all the same. Neither of them say a word about it in the morning, but it happens again and again, eventually nearly every night.

When the snow comes, Arya ignores the other boys and ventures out on her own. She carries Needle, though she knows it’s not a hunting tool and several lengths of rope. She traipes through the snow with careful ease, remembering the snows of summer below her feet. 

Snares aren’t too hard to figure out. After setting them, she continues through the wood. Snow hares are about, and she thinks she spies a doe. If she is to become a hunter, she must learn her prey. She thinks on her days of chasing cats, and wonders if it’s much different. She doesn’t even remember the rabbit she’d caught on the way to Harranhal. She thinks she ought to remember a beast she killed with her hands. She has more sympathy for the rabbit than she did for Polliver. 

One of her snares picks up a duck. Arya wrings its neck before carrying it back. Ducks are good in winter, with their thick layer of fat. 

The fat makes it roast up all nicely when Hot Pie cooks it for supper. When she walks out of the woods carrying it, she sees several of the children scatter. 

“You’re getting a reputation,” Gendry informs her, when she stops by the forge after giving the duck to Grace to take to the kitchen. 

“A good one?” She asks. 

Gendry laughs. 

“Some of the girls are in awe of you. Some of the boys are terrified of you.”

“Good,” she responds, though her insides twist. Maybe this new Arya is frightening, instead of frightened. The cat instead of the mouse.

The snow also makes it easier come the days that Willow orders all the orphans into a line, strips them down and bathes them in the big kitchen tub. They have to make more trips to fill it, but the snow doesn’t weigh as much and it takes little more time to melt than it does to heat.

Arya stays as a third set of hands. She and Sansa used to carry Rickon around like a doll, she’s had a fair hands experience in wrangling small children. 

When the last orphan has been dried off and sent to bed, Arya goes to join them before Willow grabs her wrist and drags her back. 

“You too,” she says, 

Arya groans, having been hoping to get her bath in the morning, in water that hadn’t already been run through by all the others. 

She strips and runs herself over with the soap and cloth as quickly as she can get away with in the murky water. She’s just standing and drying her hair off when she hears a voice by the door. 

She turns, and all she sees is Gendry’s glowing face. His blue eyes meet hers for a long moment and she feels herself blush from her face down to her breasts. She makes no move to cover herself. He scurries away, and she sighs. 

Jeyne comes and touches her shoulder as she finishes dressing. 

“I try not to pry too much, and the two of you did come in together...but we’re not hurting for room, you can sleep separately if you need to.,”

It’s ridiculous, but Arya’s chest hurts at the idea of sleeping alone again after so long.

“It’s not a problem for me,” she tells Jeyne, “But I’ll have to talk to Gendry to see if it is for him.”

When she returns to their room, Gendry’s lying on the bed flat on his back, but not under the covers, so Arya knows he’s not asleep. He turns away at the sound of her approach, and her ears glow when she realizes his hand had been lingering on the front of his breeches, and wonders if he’d scurried hearing her come upstairs, as she often did in the mornings. Still, she lays beside him in her shift. 

She sighs deeply before speaking, 

“You don’t need to beat yourself up over it, I know it was an accident.”

There’s a long gap of silence before she continues. 

“And it didn’t make me feel bad.” It didn’t feel anything like watching the men in King’s Landing leering at serving girls, in fact, “It...actually felt sort of nice.”

She feels him shift, and his voice demands, a little hoarse, 

“Nice?”

She laughs. 

“My sister and her closest friend used to call me “horseface”. I grew up always thinking I was ugly. It’s nice to know I’m not.”

She doesn’t get a response from that, so she cuts to the chase. 

“Jeyne asked me if we want to sleep separately from now on. I told her I didn’t mind. Do you?”

“No!” he says, immediately, rolling onto his back and sitting partially up. His voice softens a bit when he continues. “When you sleep beside me, she doesn’t appear in my dreams as much.”

Arya’s touched. It never occurred to her, but sleeping beside him, she hasn’t had nearly as many nightmares as she had after the wedding. She puffs up her chest. 

“Good. Maybe we’ll get to the point where we can get her out of the rest of your head too, and she won’t poison perfectly normal thoughts,” she pauses, “Like accidentally seeing a friend naked, and being disgusted with yourself for daring to think she was pretty.”

Her heart flutters, wondering if he’ll try to rebuke her words, but he says nothing.

Arya wonders, falling asleep, if he’ll still be willing to hold her at night after this. She gets her answer in the morning, when he’s pressed somehow even closer to her than he’d laid before, from head nearly to foot. She feels something hard pressing into her backside. 

It’s not that she doesn’t know what’s happening, Gods know the men on the way to Harrenhal were not even a little shy, with their cocks or their words. But after last night, she still has trouble connecting their crudeness with Gendry. 

Her face goes red, but her mind races. She tries not to dwell on how thin her shift is, how easy it would be for Gendry to lift it over her bum, pull his cock from his breeches and be inside her. She wonders how it would feel. He must know she can feel him, she wonders if he can feel her. 

She freezes solid when she hears Gendry grunt, and roll onto his back, throwing one hand over his eyes and muttering about the early sun. He stands, dressing and leaves the room saying something about a bath. 

As soon as she hears the door stick, she furtively lifts her shift over her hips and dives her fingers between her legs, finding herself warm and slick and so, so sensitive. Her fingers have, in their time, learned where this all goes, and it’s barely a few minutes before she rolls and presses her mouth into the pillow, grunts and groans threatening to turn into howls. 

It’s a few days later, while out hunting, that she thinks she catches a glimpse of Nymeria. 

It doesn’t take too much attention, because it’s that same sennight that they hear that Stannis has gone north. 

They had looked at each other, curious, in the kitchen when the guest talking had spoken. He had said that Stannis had gone to aid the Night’s Watch. 

“Do you think..she went with him?” Gendry wonders, voice quiet from behind the kitchen door, so as to be unheard.. 

Arya frowns. 

“It sounds like he took his wife and daughter with him, so it makes sense.”

Her stomach churns, threatening to upend itself, at the thought of the Red Woman in the same place as Jon. She was nearly sick at it. She can only hope her attentions are drawn away, perhaps one of the other boys of the Night’s Watch, forbidden from touching girls, had the so-called King’s Blood. She didn’t want what happened to Gendry for anyone, but least of all for Jon.

The snow falls more heavily, and the cold seeps in. It’s in everything, the air, the floor, the bathwater, the well-water, the benches. Arya sometimes chops extra wood just to feel the heat it brings to her flesh. Near the only thing it’s not gotten into is the stew. 

Which is good, as food is being stretched thinner. When seated in the kitchen, Arya and Gendry watch as Hot Pie shakes his head as he’s forced to stretch the bread dough thinner and thinner. Arya even spies one day when he is forced to mix a bit of sawdust in to make enough for the loaf. Even Hot Pie’s face has gone pale and thin. He makes few pies in winter. 

Arya goes out to hunt, but her returns are diminishing. The ducks have flown south, and the hares become better at hiding. Sometimes she swears she hears a wolf howl, and she whispers a prayer for them, her old friend or not.

When the rivers freeze, the number of guests actually begins to pick up, as the river with the broken bridge can again be traversed. Arya and Gendry begin preemptively eating their supper in the kitchen every day so as not to have to hide their faces. 

Ends up being a good thing the day that even Jeyne and Willow go out to greet one of the men of the Brotherhood. 

Arya and Gendry don’t recognize the voice, but they keep quiet all the same. It sounds young, almost as young as Arya. Neither of them can eat a bite while they listen. 

“Is it true Lord Beric’s dead?” they hear Willow ask. 

“Aye,” the boy replies, “And it’s not been the same since. We were all for following the Lady’s orders are first. Devoted she is. We had no objections to killing Lannister and Frey men, but…”

Arya feels her stomach sink. She herself would like to spill the blood of as many Lannisters and Freys as possible, but the boy speaking sounds so frightened...

“We caught a squire the other day, boy was barely my age. She declared him guilty and had us hang him same as all the others.”

Arya’s nearly sure she’s going to be sick now. Whatever she’d thought of Beric, he would have never sentenced a child to hanging.

Willow and Jeyne, to their credit, both sound horrified. They offer to let the boy stay here, but he declines. 

“Winter is coming,” he admits, “And I know you lot probably barely have enough for yourselves. You’ve sheltered us many a time, even if the others have forgotten you, I’ll do my best to keep around.”

And Arya knows it’s winter, even if the white raven hasn’t been seen. 

One night, Gendry sits on the end of their bed, deep in thought. 

“What is it?” she asks, changing to her shift again

“Should we move on? Like you said before?”

Arya thinks on it. It might be a good idea, especially with knowing the Brotherhood is still active and more bloodthirsty. But…

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea. There’s food, at least for now. We don’t know how the rest of Westeros is doing…”

It’s winter now, and for all Arya can say about winter as a Stark, she knows she’s a summer child. 

“And-” she continues, stuttering, “I actually almost feel safe here.”

The words sound foreign on her tongue. She can’t remember the last time she felt safe. 

Gendry nods though, and Arya’s heart swells that maybe he feels the same way. 

“We should keep our ears open though,” he says, “In case we need to run. Whatever happens, we’ll do it together.”

With a rush of happiness, Arya kneels beside and hugs him. She can do this now and he doesn’t flinch. Part of her still doesn’t believe that he’s staying with her, will only leave if she does.

The next bit takes a head full of bravery, that comforts Arya that her old self is still under her second-hand skin. All she does is press her lips to the stubbled skin of his cheek. It’s so innocent, childish even, that she doesn’t expect to feel him stiffen. 

Her heart sinks. 

“Did she take that too?”

It’s pretty dark in their room, but she can still make out Gendry’s closed eyes, his shallow breathing. 

She knows she should pull back, but she’s sick and tired of the witch hovering over every single moment between them. 

Arya presses her lips to the corner of his eye this time. 

“Would it help if I called you stupid between?”

Gendry chuckles, and shakes his head roughly. 

“Just keep it up. I’m so...so incredibly tired of only being able to remember touching her. I’m sick of her being able to have such power over me. I don’t want to give her even a little bit more thought. I only want to think of you.”

Arya grins, her blood singing. Even after all of this, part of her still wondered if he’d reject her, still thinking of her as a little girl, covered in mud and with empty eyes, or as a princess he would be gelded for even thinking of looking at like this. 

Her lips find his cheek again, then his nose, then the corner of his mouth. 

She waits a minute, and raises a single eyebrow in his direction, before finally covering his mouth with her own. 

Young Arya never really thought this was something she would want, always thought romance was more Sansa’s wheelhouse than hers. The Arya that is here and now though, knows how hard and cold winter can be without someone beside you.

The snow continues to fall. Game becomes even more scarce. Arya and Gendry both struggle to peer into the other orphan’s bowls, to make sure the little ones are getting more than they do. 

During the day they work and chop and spar with the children to try and keep their blood rushing. 

At night, they try and kiss that warmth into each other. Gendry’s fingers are as unsteady as ever, but growing more certain. Arya merely giggles, grateful that her own nerves and inexperience won’t hold them back. 

The boy from the Brotherhood turns up twice more. 

The first time, he merely speaks of the Brotherhood’s Lady, and more of her hangings. 

The second time, he talks about how frightening she is to behold.

“Thoros had been certain she was too far gone, had been gone too long, but Beric insisted. Her neck still hangs open, slit from ear to ear, her skin still sags from being submerged in the Green Fork for so long…” 

The image drags something to the forefront of Arya’s mind, and it makes her still. She can think of nothing else. The boy does not describe anything else about the Lady, but she remembers those men outside the Twins. Their words are burned into her mind like a horse’s brand, never to leave, to haunt her to the end of her days. 

Her mind says it’s such a small chance, but…

“I’m leaving in the morning,” she tells Gendry that night in bed. “I’ll take Nan and follow that boy back to the Brotherhood.”

Gendry shoots straight up beside her. 

“You can’t! It’s not safe, not with the snow, and you heard him, they’re hanging anyone now, why would you ever-”

“I think the Lady, the Hangwoman they speak of...I think she might be my mother.”

Gendry’s face goes stony, his words stolen from him. 

“I know, I know it’s stupid, impossible to even imagine, but if there’s even a tiny chance, I have to find out…”

Gendry grabs and squeezes both her hands tightly. 

“Let me come with you then. Let us find this out together.”

Arya smiles, grateful, and it’s at that moment, that she knows in her heart that she loves him, truly. It’s somehow both monumental and completely inconsequential. 

“No,” she tells him, pulling his hands to her heart, “I won’t have you put in danger. Stay here and protect the others if need be. I will come back. I won’t leave you, or let you leave again.”

Gendry’s face is torn, seeking so hard for something he could say that could change her mind, but there is nothing. Instead he kisses her, fiercely. 

Pulling back slightly, Arya whispers against his mouth. 

“Hold me tight tonight, I’ll need, or I won’t be able to make myself leave.”

And he does. Holds her and kisses her with fire, hands touching with confidence where he’d previously only caressed. He weaves his fingers through her hair, runs his palms down her back, slides his fingers down the front of her shift to her round tits. His hand comes to rest on her thigh, close to the hem of her shift. 

She grins, wickedly, against his mouth. She rests her hand atop his. 

“For when I come back,” she promises, “I’m going to go seek one of my ghosts. Then I’ll come back, and we can fight one of yours, head on.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be the last chapter, but it turned into a monster. Last part should be up before the end of the weekend, because it's half done. 
> 
> Note, this is where the tag of "mutant mix of book and show" comes most into play. It's code for "author bends canon until she makes it end a little happier".

The snow falls lightly as Arya pursues the Brotherhood’s boy on Nan’s back. 

As she rides away from the inn, she tries to ignore the pain in her heart. Leaving in the morning had been harder than she had ever expected, even knowing she would soon return. 

She’d taken the knife she’d given Gendry, a more practical weapon. She’d left Needle on her side of the bed, a promise to return. As if he wouldn’t know from the half dozen kisses she’d pressed on him, in front of a couple of the children even. 

The boy is easy enough to follow. The snow is not heavy enough to hide his tracks, and Nan rides slowly enough that Arya can match their tracks with his, not that she thinks anyone would be following her.

The ride takes near a day, Arya pushing Nan’s pace, slow enough that they don’t need to rest. She eats the bread and cheese she took from the inn while still in the saddle. Eventually, she hears noise ahead, that tells her the boy has met up with other members of the Brotherhood. She takes to riding parallel to the road after that, hidden in the trees, Nan’s gentle gait keeping them from making too much noise.

She listens closely, trying to make out the conversation. 

“Two of them this time?” the boy asks. 

“One is a woman, the other practically a boy. Picked them both up coming south, the woman’s carrying a Lannister sword.”

Arya’s stomach sinks. 

“You ever think of just letting these poor fucks go?”

“If we didn’t catch any, the Lady might start hanging us instead.”

There’s a rough laugh, but there is no mirth in it. 

Arya continues to follow. The day goes on, and the sky gets darker and darker. Days are short in winter, after all, and the snowy sky can’t help. By the time the men begin to slow, the sky is nearly black. They meet up with other riders, one of whom is leading the horse with two figures aboard, bags over their heads. 

Eventually, they reach an area where the trees are heavier and the ground slopes upward. Arya dismounts Nan, ties her to a tree, and begins following on foot. She pulls her own cloak tight over her face.

The crowd grows, and Arya only recognizes a few of the men. They all stand around in a clearing near a cave opening on the side of the hill. About half of them look drunk, and half of both groups have bags under their eyes, eyes that are wide, as though they’ve been frightened for a long, long time. 

In the back, Arya stills, when she recognizes Thoros of Myr. He sits at the head of a fire, next to another seated figure, wearing a cloak with a heavy hood. 

One of the Brotherhood pulls the prisoners from their horses, their hands tied and heads still bagged. 

The hooded figure stands, and Arya can’t really hear much of the conversation. One of the Brotherhood pulls the bags off the prisoner’s heads, and Arya squints to try and get a look at them. 

One is tall and fair, and something about how they’re standing makes Arya think it’s a woman. The other isn’t tall at all, and his broad face seems almost simple. With a twinge, Arya realizes he doesn’t even look as old as Gendry. 

There’s argument, and yelling on both sides. The hooded figure raises a finger and there’s more arguing. She pulls a sword from the taller figure, examines it and her voice gets louder and more insistent, though Arya still can’t make out the words. One of the other men begins to shout in return, when Thoros stands, speaks, and his words quiet the crowd. 

Carefully, Arya steps closer, mindful of the crunching of the snow. She manages to make out him saying, 

“It’s late, we’ll pass the sentence at dawn.”

The men disperse, and the fire dies down. The hooded figure is led by Thoros back to the cave. 

The man who lays down to sleep outside the cave is one who to Arya looks the most drunk. She wonders if it’s his job as guard that drives him to drink, or if he just drew the short straw tonight. She gives him enough time until she can hear him snoring deeply. That was just one of the Brotherhood’s problems, they were far too fond of their drink. Or maybe it was their work that led them to drink.

As she approaches, Arya feels fear rise in her throat. She’s felt fear so very many times, fear for her own life, fear for others whom she loved, fear as she was utterly certain that she was about to come face to face with the stranger. This is an entirely different sort of fear. At least when she feared death, her fear would come to an end. She doesn’t know where this will go.

She remembers before, how worried she was when she was with the Brotherhood, how she had wondered if her mother would take one look at how dirty she was, and send her back. Her mother and her have never seen eye to eye on things, but she’d always been sure she loved her, or so she thought. 

Maybe it won’t matter. Maybe her gut it wrong and it won’t matter.

The cave is small, but Arya is still quite small, though she suspects she’s reached her full adult height. She creeps, as quietly as possible, and eventually the cavern opens up into a larger area, large enough for a fire and a bedroll. 

The hooded figure sits upright at the sound of her approach. The hood falls, and Arya’s breath is stolen from her chest. 

Her hair is shock pale and half gone. Her face seems to be made of wet paper, still bearing the scratches from before her death. She is Catelyn Stark, or she used to be anyway.

Her eyes frighten Arya. She’s never been frightened of her mother before. 

And the wound that took her life, the gaping slash across her throat still hangs open. When she opens her mouth, her hands reach up to pinch it shut. 

“Who are you?” the thin raspy voice demands. 

Arya remembers how unsure she was at the thought of her mother seeing her again, seeing her ragged and living among rough men. She’s still unsure, at her seeing her now, grown and broken. 

Instead of speaking, Arya merely lowers her hood. 

“Mother.”

Lady Stoneheart approaches, and touches both sides of her face. The touch chills Arya, down to her bone, and the Lady’s expression makes it worse.

Arya feels her hand linger on her knife.

An hour or so later, Arya emerges from the cave, and wipes the blood from her knife. As silently as possible, she uses the bedroll to pull the body. She’s grateful, this night, for all the wood chopping and child wrangling she’d done in the last years.

She has no way to build a raft, and the nearest water is more of a stream than a river. She has no arrows, so she simply lights a stick from the embers of the campfire and tucks it into her arms before setting the corpse adrift. 

And for a moment, she sits on the bank and weeps. She weeps for her mother, for all her hopes, that thing in the cave was not her. Her mother died at the Twins, even though her body found a way to keep moving a little longer. 

She hadn’t know she would have to set her mother free, but during the time it the cave, there was nothing else she could do.

She thinks on the Lady’s words, how she had cried out to her daughter for vengeance against every Lannister, every Frey. She hates that she has often felt the same urge, longed for the same blood to spill. She likes to think she wouldn’t stoop low enough to condemn two people to death over a sword. 

For Lady Stoneheart had admitted, that was the only evidence they had against the two prisoners. 

She weeps at the thought of what her father would think, of what had become of his wife, of his daughter. Ned Stark was an honorable man they always said. He would swing the sword himself, not have a band of men hang his condemned.

Would she have ended up just as bloodthirsty if she hadn’t found Gendry again, hadn’t found the inn and surrounded herself again with people?

She remembers Polliver, and that man outside the Twins. How sweet their deaths had been, yet how her heart still felt as empty and dead as the Lady’s face afterwards. 

She stands, and pulls her cloak up again. She looks down the road, towards where she left Nan. She gazes further, back to the inn. It’s late, and Arya’s bones ache with exhaustion, but she could be back before tomorrow night if she rode now. She could be back in Gendry’s arms before another moon could rise. 

But she cannot be Lady Stoneheart, she cannot be heartless. 

The prisoners are being kept tied to a tree, their heads still bagged. Arya cuts their ties, and she feels the taller one rouse. 

“Quiet,” she whispers, “And follow me.”

The three figures step carefully through the snow, Arya looping around to muddy their footprints in the snow. Eventually, they reach where she has Nan tied, and Arya is ecstatic that she is still there, not stolen or released. She pulls the bags off both of the prisoner’s heads. 

“Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be traveling these parts with a Lannister sword? Not just this bunch would take exception to it. Nearly this whole kingdom still suffers under the heel of the crown,” she asks, keeping her voice low, and her hood tight. 

The taller one- the woman- answers. 

“The sword was given to me to keep an oath, and I intend to do so.”

Arya raises an eyebrow 

“A knight then? What sort of oath might that be?”

“I’m no knight,” the woman starts, and Arya suspects she’s said the same words too many times. “My name is Brienne of Tarth. This sword was given to me to protect the daughters of the deceased Lord, Ned Stark.”

Arya is momentarily struck dumb, but Brienne continues. 

“I have aided in the return of his eldest to her place in Winterfell, and I intend to do the same for the younger.”

Arya’s breath is stolen from her. 

“Winterfell was taken by the Boltons after they betrayed the Starks at the Twin..”

Brienne shakes her head. 

“It was retaken. Lady Sansa was in the Vale for a time, in disguise and under the guardianship of Lord Baelish. She initially refused my help, but I stayed close.”

Arya’s heart leaps. If she had stayed with the Hound, would she have been reunited with her sister?

“She discovered that Baelish intended to wed her to Ramsey Snow. She came to me then, and while Baelish was in King’s Landing, she revealed herself and marshalled the support of the other lords and knights of the Vale. I rode with her north to Castle Black to see her half-brother Jon Snow, and where Lord Stannis Baratheon had been planning to unseat the Boltons with his own army.”

Arya is still disbelieving. She does note that Brienne calls Stannis Lord rather than King. And she is elated to learn Jon is apparently still alive, even if still at the wall.

“It’s good we did too. Without the support of the Knights of the Vale, Stannis’s army might well have splintered after the rumors that the priestess with him was pushing him for a blood sacrifice to ensure their victory.”

Arya’s hands fly up to cover her mouth. As much as she wants to believe her home belongs to Starks again, the idea of Stannis, of _her_ having set foot there makes her want to be sick. 

“Do you believe it would have worked.”

Brienne’s smile is grim, and Arya suspects she shares in her distaste for Stannis, though she doubts it’s for the same reason. 

“The two armies were victorious, but Stannis and his wife were killed in the battle, and there has been no sign of the Red Woman. Stannis’s daughter Shireen was stolen away from camp by Stannis’s hand when he deserted, she is at Winterfell under Lady Stark’s protection. Some of Stannis’s men who remain alive seem to believe she would have been the chosen sacrifice.”

Arya’s insides twist. Gendry was bad enough, the worst to her mind, but she cannot fathom a man who could convinced, through any means, to murder his own daughter. 

“Shall I begin to spread this story among the south then?” Arya asks, trying to keep her voice light. 

“I will remain in the south until I find Arya Stark. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any word? A highborn girl, though she might not look it, perhaps seven and ten years old now, with brown hair and gray eyes?”

Arya squeezes her eyes shut beneath her hood. She forces her mind to recall all the people she has pretended to be since she had last been herself: Nan, Arry, Arya with no family name. 

“I may have,” she admits, and Brienne’s face lights up, even the quiet boy beside her looking pleased. “But I don’t know if she will go with you. She’s become awful untrusting.”

“If you could-”

Arya remains quiet. 

“I will speak to her. If she is willing to meet you, where shall I tell her to go?”

The quiet boy speaks up. 

“Last time we came through here, there was a boy at the inn at the Crossroads who knew her. Might she be more open to it if there was someone there she already knew?”

The boy is clearly not as simple as he looks, and this is confirmation that these are the same people Hot Pie mentioned speaking to those years ago. 

“I will speak to her. Do you know how to get to the Crossroads from here?”

Brienne looks at the boy (she thinks Hot Pie said his him was Patrick or something), who looks, even in the moonlight, rather worn. 

“We will rest for tonight and set off in the morning.”

Arya nods. 

“There’s a bridge out, so you may need to go around the long way. It shouldn’t be more than a few days walk.”

“Will we still have to worry about the Brotherhood?” Patrick-or-something asks. 

“They remain in these woods, but their Lady will be calling for no more hangings. Without her, they are no more dangerous than any other. They claim to fight for the smallfolk, sometimes they even do.”

“We should go north as soon as possible.” Brienne insists, “Lord Baelish has no doubt heard from his many spies what has happened up north even if the smallfolk have not, and somehow I doubt he will be proud of his ward going around his back like that.”

Not like that was his style at all, Arya thought grimly 

She mounts Nan and nods to them, before riding off. 

It’s close to the middle of the night, the moon high in the sky, but Arya can’t bear to stop to rest. She pushes Nan on, rubbing the old mare’s neck in gratitude and promises her so many sugar cubes for the friend and stolid stead she has been for her all these years. 

They keep riding and Arya tries to keep her mind off the Brotherhood, or the perverse thing in her mother’s skin. She thinks of Gendry, back at the inn, and imagines Sansa, at home in Winterfell. 

Would Sansa be happy to see her? Was Winterfell even still home?

Arya thinks she hears someone riding behind her at some point, and turns in the saddle. When the sound gets louder, she pulls the reins and dismounts, holding her knife. 

The long gray snout is the first thing she sees, and then the dark gold eyes appear. 

“Nymeria?”

Arya approaches her apprehensively, one hand extended. Her stomach threatens to leap into her chest. Nymeria’s teeth begin to show and Arya feels her chest tighten, but then she extends her tongue and laps at her hand. When Nymeria quits licking, she rolls onto her back and Arya explodes with glee.

They ride so long that she gets to see the sun come up, in that moment that the snow has paused. Her eyes droop, but she will not stop. Nymeria trots on beside her. 

It’s close to noon and the clouds have closed and the snow has begun to fall again when the inn comes into sight and Arya’s heart sings. 

When she enters the clearing to the front of the inn, Nymeria sits on her stomach between two trees, watching her. 

“I know,” Arya tells her, “You’ve been wild for so long, you’re not a pet. I would not ask you to go among people.”

She’s untacking Nan at the stable, and brushing her and filling her trough from their meager bag of oats, when she hears a squeal. 

“Willow! Arya’s back!”

She doesn’t see which of the children run past yelling that, but it puffs her up all the same. 

When she comes in the front door of the inn, Willow interrupts her scrubbing to come up to her. 

“Arya!” she says, excitedly, squeezing her shoulders, “Never leave again, if you must, at least take Gendry with you, he’s been miserable to be around the last day and half.”

“Really?” Arya asks, her voice feeling strangely small. 

Willow nods. 

“Snapping at the boys, not eating his meals. He’s out in the forge now if you want to see him.”

Getting off Nan, Arya’s exhaustion has hit her like a sack of bricks. But she has to see Gendry before she goes upstairs. 

He’s in the forge to be sure. The fire’s lit, and he appears to be beating the hell out of a hinge. He’s removed his shirt, and is shining with perspiration.

Arya stands back, enjoying the show. 

As soon as he puts down his tools, she’s upon him, cheek pressed against his chest, inhaling in his scent. She doesn’t want to shock him with the touch, but she can’t help wanting to hug him. 

“You shouldn't go around being mean to people just because I’m gone,” she sniffs against his chest. When she pulls back, the look he has on his face, watching her, eyes wide and grinning. It makes the breath disappear from her throat. 

“You’re back,” is all he says. 

Arya smiles. 

“I am. I have so much to tell you too, but…”

She yawns. 

“I really need a nap. If I’m not up for supper, wake me. I’ll eat and bathe, and then I’ll tell you everything.”

She holds both of his hands in her own for what seems a lifetime before she pulls away and heads upstairs. 

She doesn’t even change, just pulls off her boots, flops onto the bed, and sleeps. 

The dreams come again, images of the Lady’s hanging face, her pointing finger, how little blood there had been on the knife. She dreams she kills her again, but the figure keeps rising, and squeezes its hands over her neck, squeezing out the life from her, again and again…

She’s eventually woken by a hand on her back, and jerks a little. 

“You alright?” Gendry asks. 

“Sorry,” she says, “Bad dreams.”

“Well, supper’s ready.”

Arya’s stomach growls, and she laughs. Gendry grabs her hand. 

“C’mon, lets get food in you.”

Arya sits up and just looks him up and down for a moment. 

“My mother would have hated you,” she blurts out. 

Gendry steps back a moment, and Arya feels awful for a second. She stands, and continues. 

“She would have hated you. Even aside your low birth, your dirty profession and your being bastard.”

She reaches out and grabs him. 

“And not even a little bit of that matters, because it doesn’t matter to me.”

Her eyes radiate sincerity as she stands on her toes to kiss him. 

“What on earth happened to you out there?” Gendry asks. 

She throws an arm around him. Her stomach growls.

“Let’s go eat and I’ll tell you everything.”

Supper is just a thin soup and sawdust thinned bread, but it fills Arya up all the same. In fact, she’s quite glad that it’s not too heavy on her stomach as her and Gendry sit in their corner of the kitchen and she tells him everything that’s happened in the last day and a half. 

His face goes through every single emotion it seems, horror, fear, joy. He looks horrified when she tells of what had become of her mother, confirmed that whatever his faults, Beric had given up his life for that. There’s a bit of petty joy in his eyes when she tells of Stannis’s death and the Red Woman’s vanishes. But when she tells him, 

“Brienne should be here in a few days, and if we don’t linger we should be able to get to Winterfell before the worst of winter begins.”

His face sticks on sadness, defeated sadness. Arya’s stomach drops. 

“What?”

Gendry looks away from her, hiding his face. 

“I guess this is goodbye then.”

Arya feels her insides go cold. 

“You don’t want to come with me?” she asks, her voice small. 

His face shifts. 

“Do you want me too?”

“Of course I do, you bloody idiot!” she exclaims, jumping to her feet. Her voice takes on a shrill, yelling tone, though she’s still trying to keep it down .

“We’ve been living together, sleeping in the same bed for over two years! We slept in the mud and sleet together, just so we could keep each other safe! You found me when I was in the worst period of my life and kept me from drowning in it!”

She burns as she says it. All these years, and he still thinks of her as “milady”, somehow more important than him, as if he could ever be unimportant. Her voice softens. 

“After all of that and you think I would leave you behind? Didn’t I just promise you that I wouldn’t?”

He’s still seated, so she’s looking him straight in the eye. She spares a look around the inn, to where Hot Pie is clearing the supper dishes, and Willow comes in to help wash up, listens to the sounds of the orphans laughter echoing through the walls.

“I could be happy here,” she says, her voice quiet, “With you, and the children, and Jeyne and Willow and Hot Pie. I could be happy here forever. But I want you to see Winterfell, I want my brother and sister to meet you. I want them to know what you’ve done for me.”

He reaches out and carefully wraps his arms around her, resting his head on her shoulder. 

“I couldn’t sleep last night without you,” he admits, “the bed felt empty, but it still smelled like you. I thought it would be easier if I just got used to you being gone, so that it wouldn’t hurt all over again if you left again.”

Arya wiggles and kisses the side of his neck.

“I promised you something else before I left.” she whispers, a hint of lust, “And I intend to keep that promise.”

She pulls back, and Gendry’s pupils are so large his eyes look black. 

“I need to close up the forge,” he says. 

“And I need a bath,” Arya replies. 

He nods, and stands. 

“I’ll meet you upstairs.”


	4. Chapter 4

Arya takes her bath swiftly. There’s no time to fill the tub properly, so she just heats a pot of water and uses the soap and rag to rub the sweat and grime from the day’s ride off of her skin.

She climbs the inn’s stairs. Inside the room, she lights the candle and changes into her shift. When Gendry comes up to join her, carefully shutting the door behind him (it still sticks), she’s standing beside the window. 

“Look,” she says, pointing to the edge of the forest, where Nymeria has laid down to sleep.

Gendry nods. 

“Some of the children were curious about her earlier, pulling her ears and such. I was scared and almost woke you, but she growled once and they took off.”

“I can’t believe she’s been here this whole time,” she muses, “maybe she was waiting…”

Arya shakes her head. She doesn’t want to ponder on it. 

“I think that’s what scared me earlier,” he admits, “you used to always go on about pack, and I thought that once you’d found some of your family was alive, you would want to go back to your own pack.”

Arya looks up at him. 

“You ever hear about wolf packs? All those things about alpha wolves and battles of dominance...those really aren’t a thing in wild packs, they happen in packs of unrelated wolves that formed out of necessity, in famine or danger. Out in the wild, wolf packs are usually just families. Mated pairs raise their litters together, and when the babies get bigger, they wander, find their own mates. Form their own little pack. That doesn’t mean they stop being part of the first one.”

She turns, and reaches her hands up to Gendry’s shoulders and kisses him. It’s not even been two days, and she already misses this. She runs her tongue along the seam of his lips, waiting for him to let her in so she can caress his tongue with her own. 

She feels him start to pull away, and her eyes fly open. 

“Too much? Too fast?” she asks, worried. 

He shakes his head, sitting on the end of the bed. 

“No, no...I want this. It’s just, I don’t really know how to start off…”

Arya cocks her head at him. She too knows very little. She’s heard plenty from men on the road about their conquests, she’s pretty sure she could figure out how things fit, but none of those boasts had anything to do with feelings. And right now, Arya’s full to the brim of feelings.

She sits beside him on the bed.

“You could start by taking off your shirt.”

With barely any hesitation, he stands and pulls it over his head. She suspects it’s because she’s already seen him without a shirt plenty. 

She takes the time to appreciate though. 

“You’re beautiful,” she tells him, running her fingers along his chest, brushing the dark hair, tips lingering over a nipple. ”Part of me just wants to knock you down and crawl all over you, kiss every little bit of your skin.”

Arya had worried her words might scare him, but is very surprised when he growls. He brings up one arm around her, pulling her to him. 

“Maybe we can build up to that,” he mutters into her ear, 

Her fingers are still resting on his chest, so she lightly pinches one of his nipples, earning her another growl. 

She moves back from him slightly, and reaches for the bottom of her shift. 

“Wait,” Gendry says, reaching out for her wrist. 

Arya looks up at him, confused. His fingers curl around her wrist. 

“You’ve asked me so many times,” he starts, “but are _you_ sure you want to do this?”

Arya’s eyes grow more confused. 

“Of course.”

“I mean, this is sort of life altering, especially since you’re planning on waltzing right back into a highborn’s life. Aren’t you scared at all?”

Arya looks up through her lashes at him, and shakes her head. 

“I don’t think I could ever be scared of you. And I do want to do this...I have for some time. I want to know what it’s like, to be with someone like this, on my own terms. So many girls get it stolen from them, and so few get to learn it with someone they love.”

Gendry’s eyes go wide, and Arya realizes she’s never said it out loud. She grins, sheepishly, and Gendry’s expression turns cheeky. He reaches out to hold her hips and pull her closer to him for a teasing kiss.

Arya can barely pull herself back enough to pull her shift over her head, and discard it on the floor. 

Gendry’s eyes somehow go even darker, hardly even a hint of blue left, and Arya feels herself blush as his eyes trail along her. He leans forward to capture her lips again, and his hands rest on her tits. His lips begin to move south, along her chin and her neck, and his fingers tease at her nipples. 

“Oh,” Arya squeaks under his movements. He pulls back a bit. “Your hands,” she explains, “They’re rough, but it feels good.”

That earns her a grin, and the fingers at her nipples gently begin to tug on them. Arya feels herself get far wetter between the legs at the feeling, a tickling pull down her back and to her middle. She kisses at his neck, his collarbone, even his ears, sucking one of his lobes between her lips as he continues to play with her nipples. 

Skin properly warm and shivery, she reaches out and gently pats one of Gendry’s thighs. 

“Now I may lack experience, but I’m pretty sure we’re not going to get anywhere with these on, so come on now, off with them.”

He smiles almost shyly, as he unties his breeches and slides them to the floor, kicking them off each ankle. There’s just a tiny hint of darkness in his eyes, and so she tries to ease it with a giggle.

“What”” he asks, defensive. 

“Sorry,” she says, through her hands, “I mean, I’ve seen my brothers naked before, but Gods above, cocks are sort of stupid looking aren’t they?”

His cock looks rock hard, dark red, the tip shining. It still makes Arya feel powerful, to know she made him react so strongly. 

Though he looks indignant, Arya is still surprised when he lays down, and grabs her by the hand to pull her on top of him. She lands on his lap with an “oof.”

His fingers linger along her tits for a few moments, before moving south, slowly. 

Arya lets out a small mewl when he reaches the patch of hair, and parts her lips with a finger, murmuring something about her needing to be ready. He groans in surprise when he finds her already soaking wet. 

“Are you going to be alright, like this?” she asks, gesturing at his chest, remembering his words about being pushed on his back and chained. 

“I think so,” he says, staring up at her, “You’ve never done this so it will probably be easier for you to have some control.”

Arya smiles, suddenly bashful at his concern. He was always concerned for her, even at his own expense. She tilts down to kiss him sweetly, and he leans up on his elbows to meet her halfway. 

“Are you sure?” she asks, breathy. 

“Yes,” he says, nodding and then with only a soft stutter, hands running up and down her arms, “Just keep talking to me yeah?”

Arya smiles, kissing him for a long moment, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. 

“I think I can do that.”

She shifts her legs so she’s straddling him properly, and wiggles further down so she can feel him pressing against her backside. She leans down and braces her hands on his shoulders. 

“It’s just me,” Arya whispers, “We’re in the Riverlands, at the inn. We both have our clothes off, but I’m not her. We’re about to-,” she swallows roughly, mouth struggling around the words, “-make love for the first time. I’m a little nervous, yeah-” she glances her eyes up at his, before kissing him once, “but I’m excited too.”

Arya snakes a hand down to stroke his cock, still stiff and hot under her grip. 

“It seems like you are too.”

Gendry offers her an ever so slightly nervous smile, that turns into a soft moan as she lifts up and takes him in hand. She can’t help the little whimper that escapes her when she starts to sink down- it feels so very strange and stings a bit- and he reaches up to touch the side of her face, to try and soothe her as her eyes fall closed. 

When she sinks down and settles, she stills and blinks open one eye, and then the other. 

“Oh,” she says, in a much more even toned voice. She rolls her hips once, and chuckles, “They always said it would hurt terribly.”

Gendry’s pulled himself up a bit so he can touch her more freely as she rolls her hips again and begins rocking, finding a rhythm that sends heat rushing throughout her. 

“You feel incredible,” he whispers into the skin of her neck.

Arya grins bashfully. 

“You feel pretty good yourself,” she says, beginning to raise and lower her hips, more confident, “bigger than my fingers.”

Gendry’s smile turns lusty, mischievous, and Arya figures sometime she’ll have to regale him about all the things she would do after he left bed in the mornings. 

She continues moving, and even the strangeness fades away, and everything begins to just feel right. Gendry’s eyes are wild, his mouth parted, wonderful little groans and grunts escaping him. He can’t seem to stop touching her, and his eyes won’t leave her face.

Gendry’s hands are on her shoulders, pushing her towards him, his head is ducked and he’s sucked a nipple into his mouth, causing little sparks to shoot through Arya, when suddenly he stills, nails scraping into her skin and Arya feels a sudden gush of warmth inside her. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs into her chest, as Arya realizes he’s spilled and gone soft. She barely has time to be disappointed before he’s shifted and replaced his cock with his fingers, rubbing at her tender flesh until she comes, with a whine against his chest. 

He continues murmuring apologies into her skin, even as they both collapse back against the pillows. 

“Next time I’ll be able to go longer,” he promises. 

A smile plays at Arya’s face, and she pushes his hair back from his sweaty forehead. 

“So it was good then?” she asks, going for cheeky, but secretly wanting the assurance. 

Gendry picks up one of her arms and wraps it around himself, burrowing into the crook of her arm, kissing her cheeks, moving to her chin and her neck. 

“It was wonderful,” he assures her. “And- not just that it felt good,” he reaches and touches her chest, where her heart is still racing, “I didn’t know it could be like that, not for me, not anymore.”

His words make Arya feel like she’s going to spill over, so she laughs. 

They stay like that, smiling and laughing and touching, exploring. Pleased to be able to do so, and learning everything they can. 

When Gendry is hard enough to go again, he takes her on her back, this time with eagerness and gusto. Her knees are bent against his hips, and he hooks his arms underneath and pushes them up further towards her chest. Arya misses the sense of power from being on top, but admits this position has its own benefits, not in the least that Gendry’s fingers have learned enough that she comes with him still inside her this time. 

At some point in the night, Arya pulls her shift from the floor and puts it back on. Gendry on the other hand, is apparently happy to sleep naked again like he used to, even in the cold of winter. 

In the very early morning, Arya wakes to Gendry nuzzling the back of her neck, dotting kisses on her back and shoulders. She can feel him hard again against her rump, and Gendry’s eyes seek hers over her shoulder for permission. She gives it by giggling and rubbing back against him. 

And she finds that being taken like this, from behind, shift thrown up over her hips and one of his legs sandwiched between hers, is exactly as delicious as she imagined. 

Later in the morning, Arya forces herself to climb out of bed to fill up the water basin. She leans over Gendry’s still sleeping body and nuzzles his cheek. 

“I’m getting the water. I have to wash all your come off of me. It’s all dry and gross now.”

Her words must make their way in, because by the time Arya returns with the water, Gendry’s sitting stiff up and watches as she dips the rags and washes her stomach and thighs. 

He hadn’t lasted the first time, but the second time he’d pulled out and spilled on her stomach with a groan. The third time he’d pulled out just barely in time to splatter her thighs with more seed. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, but his eyes tell Arya that it is in the harsh light of day. 

“I know where Jeyne keeps the herbs for the tea. I’ve seen her brew it for guests before.”

Gendry’s eyes stay dour, and he responds as though he barely even heard her. 

“We can walk out to the village today, find the septon.”

Arya looks at his face. His sentiments don’t surprise her, he’s always been so stuck on the bastard thing. His casualness surprises her though. They’ve never even discussed marriage, aside from her old fears of. Part of her is still shocked that he would even want to marry her. 

She sits back down on the bed, running a hand along his face. And after a moment, Arya realizes she would be perfectly fine waking up next to this face for all her years to come. 

“We can if it’s that important to you. If it were up to me, I’d wait until we got far enough north to find a weirwood tree, and marry like northerners do, in the eyes of the gods.”

Gendry doesn’t say anything else, so Arya soothes him with a kiss, then gets dressed as she usually would.

When they go downstairs, Arya swiftly brews her tea and sips it while she helps Willow spoon the porridge out for breakfast. It tastes vile, but she figures that that at least deters anyone from drinking from her cup. That’s a problem with so many children around.

Once they’re done with breakfast and the dishes have been cleared as washed, Gendry corners her by a wall and grabs one of her wrists. 

“It’s that important to me.”

Arya swallows, and nods. 

“Let me get my cloak, and I’ll let Jeyne know.”

The snow is falling softly again, blanketing the ground. The view of the village coming into sight is pristine. Shopfronts are thin of goods, but the one’s available are still out and being sold. The sept is in the center of it all. 

The septon doesn’t even ask her her family name, He asks very little of them, and Arya wonders what weddings even look like for the common people. Before she even knows it, they’re walking back to the inn. 

The wind begins to carry a chill and when Arya shivers, Gendry wraps an arm around her shoulders. 

“I know it doesn’t matter to you,” he admits, “but if I find myself being interrogated by your siblings, I’d like to be able to say I at least tried to do right by you.”

Well, perhaps her mother would have liked him at this moment.

They walk quietly for a few more minutes, before Gendry opens his mouth again. 

“What you said yesterday, about how few women get to lose their maidenheads to men they actually love? Lots of men seem to completely dismiss love, think of it as something for silly women. I mean-” 

The snow is cold enough that the breath in front of his lips condenses into little clouds of fog. 

“If I’d never met you again, I assume I would have tried to move past what the Red Woman did to me. Maybe I would have paid a whore to help me forget, maybe I might have used my thick head and realized some random girl was flirting with me while she was doing it instead of an hour later. But I can’t imagine-”

He turns to face her, and briefly wraps his arms around her waist. 

“I can’t imagine it being half as good as it was. I think love makes it different.”

That’s his way of saying it, and Arya is grateful. Seeking her lips against the cold, he whispers. 

“And I would be stupid to look a gift horse in the mouth, and let a wonderful, wild girl who I loved get away. I know I couldn’t tame her, but at least I could ride with her.”

Arya’s so pleased, she even looks past the “horse” comment. 

“Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look,” Arya admits.

Arya gazes up at the sky, letting snowflakes land on her face. She had always thought marriage would be the end for her, that Arya Stark would disappear into the monolith of the Lady. 

“I thought I would feel different, but I don’t. We’re just going to go back, eat supper, help out, play with the children and go to bed. Nothing’s different is it?”

“I think that says more about how we were living before.”

Arya gazes back up at the sky. 

“I’m still Arya.”

When they approach the inn, Arya tugs on Gendry’s hand towards the forest. It’s then that she introduces him to Nymeria. 

“She’s enormous,” he says, with a wary eye, “You sure she won’t try and eat me?”

Arya watches Nymeria circle him. 

“You didn’t bathe this morning, so you probably still smell like me. She’ll know. Besides, she’s not starving, wolves don’t generally eat humans unless they are.”

Gendry still looks wary, but allows Nymeria to lick his hand and nuzzle his side, and seems pleased when she sits in front of him and allows him to pet her ears. 

Arya’s right, the rest of the night continues with hardly any change. A couple of the girls congratulate her, and one of the older boys claps Gendry on the back and from the look on his face, asks him a question he has no intention of answering. Gendry takes his bath and Arya helps Willow clean the kitchen,

At the end of the night, they retire to bed. 

“I should warn you,” Arya tells him when they’re in the space between waking and sleep, “The cold here in winter is nothing compared to the north. We have blizzards there that last days. Are you sure you can handle it?”

Gendry winces at the thought. He’s on his back, Arya having previously kept good on her promise to try and kiss every bit of him. Aside from the momentary darkness that had taken his eyes when she had tentatively kissed the head of his cock, she had found all of him quite satisfactory. 

In response to her comments about the cold, he grabs her by the side and rolls her on top of him. She stretches out, covering what of his body he can with her limbs. 

“I think you’re the best blanket I could hope to find,” he answers with a grin. 

Arya’s quiet for a bit, running her fingers along the muscles in his arms. 

“You’re so strong,” she comments, “I never would have thought you could be so gentle.”

“When you’re so much bigger than the other children, you have to know how to hold yourself back, or you’ll hurt someone. And in smithing, you can’t just pound the steel-”

His hands move down to her backside.

“-at full strength, all willy nilly, you have to know how, otherwise it just ends up a smashed, shapeless lump.”

Arya runs a finger along his chest. 

“Everyone always used to say I was wild. I’m glad you were strong enough to hold onto me, even if I’m just dragging you along while I run wild.”

Gendry squeezes his arms around her. 

“Please never stop.”

Brienne and Podrick (it served Arya absolutely no surprise that Hot Pie wasn’t completely accurate on the name) turn up the next day in time for dinner. 

When they do, Arya is sitting at one of the tables helping Elinor string the beans. She is dressed in her hunting clothes, with Needle on her hip, hoping to look more accurate to the description Sansa likely gave. 

“Arya Stark?”

Arya turns her head to look at the other woman. 

“Yes?”

Later, over a mug of ale, Podrick shakes his head, wondering how after all these years, it was this easy. 

“We should leave tomorrow after breakfast,” Brienne tells her, alongside her own ale, as they wait out the remaining hour or so before supper.

Arya nods. 

“We have a horse. She should be able to carry the both of us. She’s done it before and we don’t have very many things to bring.”

“We?” Brienne asks. 

Arya turns and gestures over her shoulder to where Gendry is helping stoke the fire. He’s kept to himself over supper, sitting at the table but not interacting. 

“Gendry Waters. My husband.”

She fixes Brienne with a gentle stare, and before she can react, continues. 

“It’s both of us or neither.”

Brienne chooses not to challenge that. 

Arya eyes the sword at her hip. If what she’d heard from her was true, it was made of half of Ice, her father’s sword. 

“You carry a sword, and have spent years trying to fulfill an oath, yet you still insist you are not a knight?” she asks her. 

Brienne sighs. 

“Women cannot be knights. My father let me train, train until I was good. I became part of Lord Renly Baratheon’s guard, and I have taken oaths and performed service. But I am not a knight.”

Arya’s eyes are a bit downcast. 

“When I was young, my father told me I would marry a lord and my sons would be lords and knights, but I would never be.” She smiles grimly, “Well I married, he was right about that part.”

Brienne’s eyes move across the room to where Gendry sits. 

“You say the young man is a Waters? Does he have any idea of his parentage?”

Arya’s grimace does not change. 

“You’re not the first person to see it.”

“He’s the spitting image of Renly.”

She doesn’t have to say anything else. Stannis would never have fathered a bastard, so possessed by his idea of duty. And given what Arya had heard of Renly, she doubted he would have either.

“Gendry grew up in Flea Bottom, he has no love for deceased King Robert. And our only meeting with Stannis...lets just say that if either of us ever encountered him again, our first instinct would be to run him through with a sword. Was Renly at least a good man?”

Brienne’s smile is genuine. 

“Among the best I’ve known.”

At least, Arya thinks, there is that. 

Arya’s eyes return to Brienne’s sword again. 

“We still have a bit of daylight,” she begins, “Could you...show me it in action. I have a sword myself.”

Brienne’s eyes find Needle at her side, and looks at Arya, uncertain. 

“I’m afraid I may end up breaking that thing in two in direct combat.”

There’s a pause, and Arya is disappointed, but Brienne continues. 

“Take Podrick’s for a bit.”

Podrick’s sword is bigger than Needle, and Arya is unused to the balance. Still, sparring with Brienne awakens something in her, something deep inside. 

Gendry stands off to the side with some of the children, watching, cheering. 

That night, Arya has a nightmare of Winterfell burning. A figure rises out of the ashes, and Arya runs to it, thinking it’s Sansa only for it to spin around and have the face of Lady Stoneheart. 

She wakes and does not let herself dwell.

In the morning, they are putting their packs on Nan, and saying their goodbyes. 

“Can’t believe you were here this long and never told us,” Jeyne says, hugging Arya, and slipping her a package of herbs. 

“There was a time when I thought it was much better to not be Arya Stark,” she admits. She’s glad those days are gone.

“Make sure not to forget us back in Winterhell,” Hot Pie tells her, plying Gendry with bread.

“We might be back. If my sister is as insufferable as she used to be, we might run straight back down the Kingsroad.”

She jests, but her and Gendry are both apprehensive. It’s been so long since she has lived the highborn life, and she will dreadfully miss the children and the forest and the inn. Floor scrubbing and wood chopping and tin tub baths. She’s going to miss it all. 

They mount Nan and are barely out of sight, when Nymeria pads out from the trees behind them. She howls. And off in the distance, Arya hears a howl in return. 

She turns to look at Gendry over her shoulder. 

“It sounds like she may have found her own mate.”

The wolf howl burrows under her skin, like the feel of steel in her hands. 

She is Arya Stark. Neither time, nor place, nor marriage will change that. 

She is Arya Stark, and she is going north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Title source, because apparently all my fic will forever be song lyrics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iYmGMWjqvI)


End file.
